Brief Histories presents heat press fold bend by Bayan Kiwan, the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York City.
In Kiwan’s practice, painting and glazing reveal different temporalities and dimensions, and unfold in how a room of bodies unfurl a tableau of intimacy, desire, and political potential. Lines melt into the swells and depressions of fired ceramics to tie the cosmically complex with the intimately connected, a universe of collective inheritance that carries the weight of memory, diaspora, grief, exhaustion, but also love, tenderness, and slowness; what seems distant inevitably spills in the apartment living room.
Central to the exhibition is a large-scale painting composed of overlapping figures, the protagonists include friends and family, and as often depicted in her paintings, they are caught in moments of closeness and vulnerability. Layered into a dense interior, the figures are pressed into the architecture and collapsed onto one another, forming one undulating body in a compressed space. Interior and exterior merge, and the viewer is drawn into a space of gestures that hold intimacy, buoyancy, and grief.
A series of ceramic works surround the exhibition. These sculptural portraits bear the physical evidence of their making—glazes pooling in recesses, brushstrokes following the curves of fired clay. The ceramic forms mirror the painting’s attention to bodily presence and emotional weight. They linger on the folds that emerge from their pose: hand on cheek, shoulders in an embrace. Faces distort, stretch and contract on their wavy surface. In both these ceramic works and painting, Kiwan reflects on what is carried in the body and through contact, and how tenderness endures through rupture, exhaustion, and time.
glazed ceramic, 88 × 22 × 5 cm, unique
